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TOLERANCE 


<EUia lectures 

ADDRESSED TO THE STUDENTS OF SEVERAL OF THE 
DIVINITY SCHOOLS OF THE PROTESTANT 
EPISCOPAL CHURCH 


BY 

PHILLIPS BROOKS 

> * 

Rector of Trinity Church, boston 



NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 

31 WEST TWENTY THIRD STREET 

1887 



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Copyright, 1887, 

By E. P. Dutton & Co. 


Umbergitg ^rcss: 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 


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FIRST LECTURE. 

Gentlemen : 

I HAVE accepted with grateful pleasure 
the privilege of meeting you upon two 
evenings and talking to you upon Tol¬ 
erance. I chose that subject because I 
had long vaguely thought of lecturing 
upon it, and also because it seemed to me 
as if there were no group of men to whom 
one could so fitly speak upon it as a gath¬ 
ering of students of theology. To them 
more than to other men must come the 
puzzling problems and interesting sugges¬ 
tions which the whole subject of tolerance 
involves. 

I want to speak this evening about the 
nature and the history and the hope of 
tolerance. In my other lecture I should 


6 


Tolerance. 


like to see the applications of what I shall 
have said to-day to some of the special 
conditions of our time and of our Church. 
So we can come nearest to covering the 
ground. 

I call my subject Tolerance, not Tol¬ 
eration. Tolerance is a disposition: Tol¬ 
eration is the behavior in which that 
disposition finds expression. A disposi¬ 
tion is to its appropriate behavior as a 
man is to his shadow. The shadow repre¬ 
sents the man, but it often misrepresents 
him. It is larger than he is, or smaller. It 
runs before him, or it lags behind him, 
according as he stands related to the light 
which casts it. We sometimes have to 
guess at what the man is by his shadow; 
and so we are constantly having to guess 
at men’s dispositions by their behavior. 
But we never can let ourselves forget that 
the disposition is the living thing; and so 
to it our thought and study must be 
given. Therefore I speak of tolerance, 
and not of toleration. 


First Lecture . 


7 

In studying first, then, the nature of tol¬ 
erance, that much-belauded and much- 
misrepresented grace of our own time, we 
want to start with this assertion,—which 
is, indeed, the key-assertion of all I have to 
say, — that it is composed of two elements, 
both of which are necessary to its true 
existence, and on the harmonious and pro¬ 
portionate blending of which the quality 
of the tolerance which is the result de¬ 
pends. These elements are, first, positive 
conviction; and second, sympathy with 
men whose convictions differ from our 
own. Does it sound strange to claim that 
both these elements are necessary to make 
a true tolerance? Have we been in the 
habit of thinking that strong, positive con¬ 
viction was almost incompatible with toler¬ 
ance? Have we perhaps been almost 
afraid to yield to the temptation to let 
ourselves go into the tolerant disposition 
of our time, because it seemed to us as if 
there were no place there for that sure and 
strong belief which we knew was the first 


8 


Tolerance . 


necessity of a strong human life? It 
would not be strange if we had all felt 
such a fear. It would be strange if any of 
us had entirely escaped it, so studiously, 
so constantly, so earnestly has the world 
been assured that positive faith and toler¬ 
ance have no fellowship with one another. 
“ The only foundation for tolerance,” said 
Charles James Fox, “ is a degree of scep¬ 
ticism.” Not many months ago a most 
respected clergyman of my own town, 
speaking at the dedication of a statue of 
John Harvard in the university which 
bears his name, declared of the Puritans 
by whom that college was created: “ They 
were intolerant, as all men, the world over, 
in all time, have always been, and will 
always be, when they are in solemn earn¬ 
est for truth or error.” I think that those 
are melancholy words. The historical fact 
is melancholy enough. That fact we must 
grant as mainly true, though not without 
fair and notable exceptions; but to fore¬ 
tell that man will never come to the condi- 


First Lecture . 


9 

tion in which he can be earnest and tolerant 
at once, — that is beyond all things melan¬ 
choly; that spreads a darkness over all 
the future, and obliterates man’s brightest 
hope. That condemns mankind to an end¬ 
less choice between earnest bigotry and 
tolerant indifference, — or, rather, to an 
endless swinging back and forth between 
the two in hopeless discontent, in everlast¬ 
ing despair of rest. Against all such 
statements of despair we want to take the 
strongest ground. We want to assert most 
positively that so far from earnest per¬ 
sonal conviction and generous tolerance 
being incompatible with one another, the 
two are necessary each to each. “ It is 
the natural feeling of all of us,” said Fred¬ 
erick Maurice in one of those utterances 
of his which at first sound like paradoxes, 
and by and by seem to be axioms, — “ it is 
the natural feeling of all of us that charity 
is founded upon the uncertainty of truth. 
I believe it is founded on the certainty of 
truth.” 


10 


Tolerance. 


One token that this is true is that only 
with both these elements present in it does 
tolerance become a clear, definable, re¬ 
spectable position for a man to stand in, 
an honorable quality for a character to 
possess. Dr. Holmes, in his Life of Mr. 
Emerson, declares that “the word ‘toler¬ 
ance’ is an insult as applied by one set 
of well-behaved people to another.” No 
doubt there are insulting tones enough in 
which the word may be used; but the 
word itself is not insulting. It expresses a 
perfectly legitimate and honorable relation 
between two minds and natures which 
there is no other word to express. Here 
is my friend with whom I entirely agree; 
his thoughts and convictions are the same 
as mine. I do not tolerate him; there is 
no place for toleration there. Here is my 
other friend, who disagrees with me entirely. 
I disagree with him. But I respect him; I 
want him to be true to his convictions; and 
while I claim the right and duty of arguing 
with him and trying to show him that I am 


First Lecture. 


ii 


right, and he is wrong, I would not silence 
him by violence if I could. I would not 
for the world have him say that he thinks 
I am right before his reason is convinced. 
Now, that is tolerance. Is there any insult 
there? Is not that a recognizable, manly 
position for me to stand in as regards my 
friend? Is either his manhood or mine 
injured or despised? But is it not clear 
also that the healthiness of this tolerance 
which is in me toward him depends on its 
integrity? It is because both its elements 
are there that it is a sound condition, 
worthy of his soul and mine. Take either 
away, and the element which is left becomes 
insulting. But then it is not tolerance which 
is insulting; for this is not tolerance; for 
tolerance is the meeting in perfect har¬ 
mony of earnest conviction and personal 
indulgence. 

Whoever has thoughtfully observed hu¬ 
man life, knows very well that any quality, 
which for its fullest perfectness involves 
two elements, will almost certainly present 


12 


Tolerance . 


strange and perplexing complications be¬ 
fore it comes to its complete condition. 
Strange indeed is the method of the 
moral progress of mankind. Not as the 
ship sails, moving through the water 
evenly, all together, every part keeping 
pace with every other part; rather as the 
man walks, bringing forward first one side 
and then the other, one side being at any 
given moment in advance of the other, 
equilibrium being always lost and regained 
again a little farther on, to be re-lost again 
immediately: so, as the man walks, does the 
moral progress of mankind advance. Thus 
it is that conviction of truth and allowance 
of dissent are never in perfect balance and 
proportion to each other; now one and 
now the other of them is always in advance, 
as the whole man in this uneven, sidelong 
fashion moves unsteadily forward toward 
the time when he shall be tolerant of his 
fellow-men just in proportion to the earn¬ 
estness with which he holds his own well- 
proven truth. 


First Lecture. 


ij 

This leads to certain complications which 
it will be well to notice, because they very 
often, as I think, confuse our thought on 
the whole subject, and seem to leave us all 
adrift. Here are two men who stand and 
look out together over the whole world of 
opinion. They are not a part of it, for 
neither of them has any real opinions of 
his own. They are like men who stand 
together on a seashore rock and look out 
over the ocean. It is nothing to them 
which way the waves are running, and 
how they cross and recross each other in 
tumultuous confusion. It is nothing to 
these men how other men are thinking. 
They are entirely indulgent. They call 
themselves, and the world calls them, tol¬ 
erant. And now suppose that one of those 
men gets a conviction: he becomes thor¬ 
oughly in earnest for something which he 
believes is true. What is the immediate 
result? Almost certainly there comes a 
chill and a reserve in his indulgence. Now 
it appears to him to be a dreadful thing 


12 


Tolerance . 


strange and perplexing complications be¬ 
fore it comes to its complete condition. 
Strange indeed is the method of the 
moral progress of mankind. Not as the 
ship sails, moving through the water 
evenly, all together, every part keeping 
pace with every other part; rather as the 
man walks, bringing forward first one side 
and then the other, one side being at any 
given moment in advance of the other, 
equilibrium being always lost and regained 
again a little farther on, to be re-lost again 
immediately: so, as the man walks, does the 
moral progress of mankind advance. Thus 
it is that conviction of truth and allowance 
of dissent are never in perfect balance and 
proportion to each other; now one and 
now the other of them is always in advance, 
as the whole man in this uneven, sidelong 
fashion moves unsteadily forward toward 
the time when he shall be tolerant of his 
fellow-men just in proportion to the earn¬ 
estness with which he holds his own well- 
proven truth. 


First Lecture. 


13 

This leads to certain complications which 
it will be well to notice, because they very 
often, as I think, confuse our thought on 
the whole subject, and seem to leave us all 
adrift. Here are two men who stand and 
look out together over the whole world of 
opinion. They are not a part of it, for 
neither of them has any real opinions of 
his own. They are like men who stand 
together on a seashore rock and look out 
over the ocean. It is nothing to them 
which way the waves are running, and 
how they cross and recross each other in 
tumultuous confusion. It is nothing to 
these men how other men are thinking. 
They are entirely indulgent. They call 
themselves, and the world calls them, tol¬ 
erant. And now suppose that one of those 
men gets a conviction: he becomes thor¬ 
oughly in earnest for something which he 
believes is true. What is the immediate 
result? Almost certainly there comes a 
chill and a reserve in his indulgence. Now 
it appears to him to be a dreadful thing 


Tolerance. 


14 

that other men should think so wrongly. 
All the indifference is gone, and the man 
is almost more than man, almost divinely 
true and sound, if he is not betrayed by 
his earnestness into some sort of bigotry, 
some intolerant wish toward these men 
who are in error. He lifts the axe, or 
lights the fire of persecution. Meanwhile 
there stands his brother where he used to 
stand, still smiling his universal smile, and 
saying benignly to all the creeds and here¬ 
sies and opinions, “ God bless you every 
one,” because he has no real creed or 
opinions, or even a genuine hearty heresy 
of his own. And now which of these two 
men shall we praise? Beyond all doubt 
the man of earnestness, the man of positive 
faith. But then he is a bigot! Will you 
praise Torquemada, standing in triumph 
beside his burning victims in the market¬ 
place in Seville, more than Montaigne, a 
century later, sitting in his library at Paris 
and patronizing all the faiths of which he 
believed not one, all of which in his soul 


First Lecture. 


15 

he despised? If Torquemada ever had 
been like Montaigne, and had come to be 
a persecutor out of pure conviction, then 
horrible as is this which he is doing, awful 
as is the lurid flame which lights his virtue, 
I must count that he has made true pro¬ 
gress; for these two good things are in him, 
— first, a firm belief in something as the 
truth of God; and next, a passionate de¬ 
sire that the truth of God should reign 
upon the earth. 

But what then? We know that this is 
not final. This praise of the bigot is not 
praise of bigotry. We are thankful for 
the traveller that he has left the City of 
Destruction and that he is on the way to 
the New Jerusalem; but none the less we 
feel the misery of the Slough of Despond 
through which he is struggling on the way. 
Our Inquisitor has made a real advance 
from the easy tolerance in which he used 
to live; but it has been as if, having started 
on his journey, he went back to get one 
part of his equipment without which his 


i6 


Tolerance . 


journey could not successfully be made. 
The man who thus goes on shore again to 
get his sails, creeps out of the harbor be¬ 
hind the other sailless boat, which is only 
drifting on the tide; but nevertheless he 
is nearer to the ultimate haven which they 
both are seeking, for the boat that has no 
sails will never come there at all. So, to 
state it quite without a figure, there are 
times when the intolerant man, in virtue, 
not of his intolerance, but of that which 
for the time has caused him to be intole¬ 
rant, is farther on toward the ultimate 
tolerance than his indulgent brother who 
stands in horror at his bigotry. Such is 
the curious complication which often marks 
men’s development on the world’s pro¬ 
gress in any good attainment. There 
comes a seeming loss of that which is all 
the time being gained. It is like the cir¬ 
cles on an eddying stream. There is one 
point in the circle which the eddy makes, 
one drop of the stream’s water, which is 
distinctly going backward, going up the 


First Lecture. 


n 

stream. It seems to be going away from 
the ocean and back toward the fountain. 
It is not so far toward the ocean as another 
drop which is hurrying by it with its eager 
face set toward the sea; and yet the back¬ 
ward-plunging drop will reach the ocean 
first. The drop which now is hurrying 
seaward will have the same weary circuit 
to make before it can really find the sea it 
seeks. It is a blessed thing to know that 
both of them, in all their eddyings and 
wanderings, are borne upon the bosom of 
a stream greater than either of them, which 
never ceases to press onward to the ocean 
which is the final home of all. 

There is no law which it is more neces¬ 
sary for one who studies human life and 
character to understand, than this law to 
which I have just alluded. The “ law of the 
three conditions ” we may call it. The Jaw 
of life, death, and the higher life would 
be its fuller name. Jesus said, “ Except a 
man be born again, he cannot see the 
kingdom of God.” “ Whosoever loseth his 


18 Tolerance . 

life for My sake,” he said, “ the same shall 
save it.” See what some of the illustra¬ 
tions are. The crude hopefulness of boy¬ 
hood passes through the disappointments 
which it is sure to meet, and comes out, 
if it keeps its health, into the robust and 
sanguine faith of middle age. A merely 
traditional religion goes into doubt, and 
gathers there strength of personal convic¬ 
tion, and comes forth the reasonable religion 
of a full-grown man. Innocence perishes 
in temptation, to be born again out of the 
fires as virtue. Life, death, and resurrec¬ 
tion is the law of life; and bigotry and 
tolerance can never be deeply understood 
unless we know how easy indulgence often 
has to die in narrow positive conviction 
before it can be born again as the gener¬ 
ous tolerance of the thoroughly believing 
man. 

The truth that qualities have their quali¬ 
ties, is one which we need always to re¬ 
member. You have not told the whole 
story when you have said that a man is 


First Lecture. 


'9 

kind, or brave, or truthful, any more than 
you have given a complete account when 
you have said of the sunset or of the bird’s 
wing that it is red, when you have said 
of the sky or of the violet that it is blue. 
As there are colors of colors, so there are 
qualities of qualities. “ How is he truth¬ 
ful, or brave, or kind?” That question 
still remains for you to ask. And in large 
part this quality of a quality will be indi¬ 
cated by the motive which at any par¬ 
ticular moment calls the quality forth 
into action. The qualities of qualities are 
largely denoted by the colors of their mo¬ 
tives shining through. This is quite true of 
tolerance. Let me enumerate very briefly 
some of the qualities of that quality, and 
see how each one is colored by the hue of 
its motive. I think that in various kinds 
of tolerance we can see six colors dis¬ 
tinctly shining through. First, there is the 
lowest of all, that of which I have already 
spoken, — the tolerance of pure indifference, 
the mere result of aimless good-nature. If 


20 


Tolerance . 


I do not care, or do not think it possible to 
know, whether there is a God or not, why 
should I not be perfectly willing that this 
man should say that there is, and this 
other man should say that there is not? 
Secondly, there is the tolerance of policy, 
— the allowing of error because it would do 
more harm than good to try to root it out, 
the voluntary disuse of a right to eradicate 
it, the leaving of the tares for the wheat’s 
sake. This is the tolerance of which Burke 
speaks when he says that “Toleration is 
a part of moral and political prudence.” 
Thirdly, there is the tolerance of helpless¬ 
ness. This is the acquiescence in the ut¬ 
terance of error because we cannot help 
ourselves. It is the tolerance of persecuted 
minorities. It was the tolerance of Jeremy 
Taylor, writing the “ Liberty of Prophesy¬ 
ing ” while the Parliament were masters in 
the land. Fourthly, there is the tolerance 
of pure respect for man. In entire dis¬ 
agreement with a man’s opinion, you are 
able still cordially to recognize his right 


First Lecture . 


21 


to his own thought, simply because he is 
a man, whether his thought will do harm 
or good. Fifthly, there is the tolerance of 
spiritual sympathy. The man’s opinions 
are all wrong; but he means well, and you 
have grown to feel the value of your spirit¬ 
ual oneness. And sixthly, there is the 
tolerance of the enlarged view of truth, 
combined with a cordial and entire faith 
in God. This is the tolerance for which 
Milton has pleaded in his application of 
the myth of Typhon and Osiris, — the tole¬ 
rance which grows up in any man who is 
aware that truth is larger than his concep¬ 
tion of it, and that what seem to be other 
men’s errors must often be other parts of 
the truth of which he has only a portion, 
and that truth is God’s child, and the 
fortunes of truth are God’s care as well 
as his. 

These are the six, — indifference, policy, 
helplessness, human respect, spiritual sym¬ 
pathy, the vastness of God’s truth. These 
are the different colors which may shine 


22 


Tolerance . 


through men’s tolerances and show what 
is the quality of this quality in each of 
them. You see where the group divides, 
— in the middle. The first three kinds of 
tolerance have something base about them; 
the last three are all noble. Just where 
that cleavage and division runs, the death 
of tolerance of which I spoke a while ago, 
is very likely to come in. Just there, a 
man entering into the power of some 
strong conviction is liable to become in¬ 
tolerant ; and his intolerance, coming there 
and thus, is full of hope for the better tol¬ 
erance which lies in its three degrees be¬ 
yond. The man is at sea only because he 
has set sail from the solid shore which is 
malarious and barren, to reach by and by 
the far more solid land which is bright and 
healthy and fruitful. Do you not see how 
necessary it is to know the kind of a man’s 
tolerance, to see what is the quality of this 
quality in every tolerant man? 

If we try to get still deeper at the roots 
of the impression which prevails so widely, 


First Lecture . 


23 


that positive convictions are unnecessary 
to, and even incompatible with, the toler¬ 
ance of opinions which are different from 
our own, I think that we shall find that 
it results from the low and meagre idea 
which so many people, even of those who 
talk the most about the sacredness of their 
convictions, have with regard to what a 
real conviction is. A true conviction, 
anything thoroughly believed, is personal. 
It becomes part of the believer’s character 
as well as a possession of his brain; it 
makes him another and a deeper man. 
And every deepening of a human nature 
centralizes it, so to speak; carries it in, 
that is, to the centre of the sphere upon 
whose surface are described all the spe¬ 
cific faiths of men. At the centre of that 
sphere sits the Spirit of Truth, of which 
all these specific faiths of men are the 
more or less imperfect and distorted utter¬ 
ances. The man who comes into that 
central place sits there with the Spirit of 
Truth and feels her power going out to the 


24 Tolerance. 

faiths she feeds on every side. It is in 
virtue of that centralness which he has 
reached that he is able to understand and 
sympathize with the whole. Deepen the 
Desert of Sahara to the centre of the earth, 
and it will know how the Himalayas came 
to be so rocky and so high. And so the 
advice to give to every bigot whom you 
want to make a tolerant man must be, not, 
“ Hold your faith more lightly, and make 
less of it;” but, “Hold your faith more 
profoundly, and make more of it. Get 
down to its first spiritual meaning; grasp 
its fundamental truth. So you will be glad 
that your brother starts from that same 
centre, though he strikes the circumfer¬ 
ence at quite another point from yours.” 
It is true, strange as it sounds at first, that 
the more deeply and spiritually a man 
believes in fixed endless punishment of 
wicked men, the more, and not the less, 
tolerant he will become of his brother who 
cherishes the eternal hope. 

Perhaps it is stating the same truth in a 


First Lecture. 


25 

little different way when we say that true 
tolerance consists in the love of truth and 
the love of man, each brought to its per¬ 
fection and living in perfect harmony with 
one another; but that these two great affec¬ 
tions are perfect and in perfect harmony 
only when they are orbed and enfolded 
in the yet greater affection of the love 
of God. The love of truth alone grows 
cruel. It has no pity for man. It cries 
out, “ What matter is a human life tortured 
or killed for Truth, crushed under the 
chariot-wheels with which she travels to 
her kingdom?” The stake-fires and the 
scaffolds belong to it. And the love of 
man alone grows weak. It trims and 
moulds and travesties the truth to suit 
men’s whims. “Do you want truth to be 
this? Then this it shall be,” it cries to 
the faithless or the lazy soul. The boy of 
whom the stranger asked the way to Farm¬ 
ington is the very image of the love of 
man that is not mingled and harmonized 
with love for truth. “ It is eight miles,” 


26 


Tolerance. 


the boy replied. “ Are you sure that it is 
so far as that? ” the weary traveller asked. 
The boy, with his big heart overrunning 
with the milk of human kindness, looked at 
him and replied, “Well, seeing you are 
pretty tired, I will call it seven miles.” 
How much of would-be tolerance has 
sounded in our ears like that! The love 
of truth alone is cruel; the love of man 
alone is weak and sentimental. It is only 
when truth and man are loved within the 
love of God, loved for His sake, truth 
loved as His utterance, man loved as His 
child, — only then is it that they meet and 
blend in tolerance. Therefore it is that 
absolute and steadfast tolerance, so far 
from being the enemy of religion, as men 
have foolishly said, can only come relig¬ 
iously, can never be complete till man 
completely loves his God. 

May I not turn, as I speak, and ask the 
personal experience of the thoughtful stu¬ 
dents who hear me to bear witness to the 
truth of what I have said? Has it not 


First Lecture . 


27 


been true with you, that the more sure you 
have been, the more tolerant you have 
been always? Why is it that we are often 
so much more ready to tolerate those who 
differ from us by the entire heaven, than 
those whose different light twinkles close 
by our side in the same constellation? We 
have full tolerance for the Buddhist and the 
Mohammedan; less for the Quaker and the 
Congregationalist; least of all for the man 
of our own Church, but of another “ school 
of thought” from ours. “ The conforming 
to ceremony hath been more exacted than 
the conforming to Christianity,” declared 
Lord Falkland of the Government of his 
day in a speech in the Parliament of 1640. 
Does it not all mean that where the dif¬ 
ference is greatest, we are most sure of our 
ground, and so most tolerant? Where the 
difference is least, we have most misgivings, 
and there tolerance is weak. Does it not 
all witness to the truth of our doctrine 
that the best tolerance demands assured 
and settled faith? 


28 


Tolerance . 


Perhaps it is not desirable, certainly it 
is not possible, in the short space which I 
can give to that portion of my subject, to 
undertake anything like a detailed history 
of the growth of the spirit of tolerance 
among mankind. I only say in passing 
that there are few subjects so interesting 
and important which have been so inade¬ 
quately treated. There is no worthy book 
upon the subject. To write one might 
well be the satisfaction and honor of any 
man’s life. All that I undertake to do in 
this direction now is just to indicate some 
points in the history of tolerance which 
seem to illustrate the principles of toler¬ 
ance which I have been trying to describe, 
confining myself entirely to that part of 
the history of tolerance which lies within 
the region of the Christian Faith. 

The Jews were intolerant deliberately 
and on purpose. It was the other side 
of human progress which was being moved 
forward in their history. They were ap¬ 
pointed to learn and manifest the power 


First Lecture . 


29 


of positive belief. Their history is like the 
hard, tight stalk of a plant which is built 
compactly and exclusively, just in order 
that it may minister to a great radiant, 
generous flower which is to bloom upon 
its summit. That flower came in Christ; 
and there in Him was set clearly and per¬ 
fectly before the world the pattern of the 
consummate tolerance. The love of truth 
and the love of man, each complete and 
each in perfect harmony with the other, 
within the embracing love of God,—is not 
that the life of Jesus? Not for a moment 
does one doubt His absolute hold on 
truth; it is so deep that He not merely 
holds the truth, He is the truth. And 
yet His patient, willing indulgence of His 
brethren, His utter refusal to use any power 
except reason and spiritual persuasion to 
turn them from their error, — all this is 
just as clear as His belief; and in Him 
there can be no doubt that the two essen¬ 
tially belong together. 

With this high, clear note struck, with 


Tolerance . 


30 

this image and pattern burning before her 
for her guidance, the Church started on 
the long, slow struggle to attain the same 
high tolerance, to match the pattern of 
her Master with her obedient life. In the 
Apostolic Church and that which imme¬ 
diately followed it, the spirit of tolerance 
was kept in a remarkable degree. Here 
and there, no doubt, we see the signs of 
a crowding forward on the side of intol¬ 
erant positive belief; but the spirit of 
brotherly kindness was so strong that al¬ 
most immediately the other side, the side 
of tolerant indulgence, was brought up to 
meet it. And then, in those earliest days, 
the Church was persecuted; and persecu¬ 
tion always makes the persecuted man or 
church a champion of tolerance. 

With the cessation of persecution, with 
the establishment of Christianity under 
Constantine, came, in the midst of many 
other evils, the enthronement and domin¬ 
ion of intolerance. The persecution of 
Jews, of pagans, and of heretics, thence- 


First Lecture . 5 / 

forth became accepted. The love of truth, 
as men interpreted it, had cast away the 
love of man, and the reason lay in the 
abandonment or the corruption of the 
love of God. 

Like so many other practices and dis¬ 
positions of mankind, Saint Augustine took 
the disposition of intolerance and backed 
it with theory and established it into a 
principle. Indeed, the life of Augustine 
illustrates within itself much of what we 
have said upon our subject. As he be¬ 
came more earnest, he became less toler¬ 
ant. These are his words in his earlier 
days: “ Be not offended at seeing among 
yourselves sinners, and even heretics. 
What know you of their future state? 
Nay, more, what know you of their pres¬ 
ent state in the mind of God?” And 
these are his words much later in his 
fervid and eager life: “I abandoned my 
first opinion, overcome not so much by 
the reason of those who opposed it, as by 
the examples which they set before my 


Tolerance . 


V 

eyes. They showed me my own city of 
Hippo, which, after having belonged wholly 
to the Donatists, was converted and re¬ 
united to the Catholic Church by the fear 
of the imperial laws, and which has now 
such a horror for that unhappy schism 
that you could not believe that it had ever 
been engaged in it.” That method of con¬ 
version “ by the fear of the imperial laws ” 
the great African bishop left firmly estab¬ 
lished in the Christian Church. 

And so it remained through all the 
Middle Ages, with only occasional out¬ 
breaks of local and individual remon¬ 
strance. It hardened into dogma, as at 
the first Lateran Council. It blazed out 
in fury, as when De Montfort slaughtered 
the Albigenses in 1209. It struck its roots 
deep as an institution when Innocent the 
Third established the Inquisition in 1208. 
The cloud broke open for a moment and 
let a ray of sunlight through, as in the 
teaching of a great, generous-hearted man 
like Saint Bernard. There were pauses 


First Lecture . 


33 

in the dreadful history of persecution be¬ 
cause there were times of absolute con¬ 
formity, when there were no heretics to 
persecute; but the whole dark tenor of 
the mediaeval history is really one and 
the same. It is what Saint Thomas 
Aquinas wrote with such fearful, calm 
deliberation and such blankly fallacious 
reasoning: “If the corruptors of money, 
and malefactors of other sorts, are at once 
by secular princes justly given up to death, 
much more may heretics, as soon as they 
are convicted of their heresy, be not 
merely excommunicated, but also justly 
killed.” That was the sum of mediaeval 
logic on the matter. 

The Protestant Reformation brought 
no sudden change of theory. The prin¬ 
ciple of persecution was asserted by many 
of the Reformed Confessions; it was held 
and declared by Luther, Calvin, Beza, 
Knox, and even by Melanchthon, Cranmer, 
and Ridley. “One mass,” cried John 
Knox, “is more fearful to me than if ten 


3 


Tolerance. 


34 

thousand armed enemies were landed in 
any part of the realm.” But though the 
theory remained, it was soon evident that 
another spirit was at work within it. Men 
of light stood up here and there, and, full 
of the belief in positive truth, still pleaded 
for tolerance. Of all the Reformers, in 
this respect, Zwingli, who so often in the 
days of darkness is the man of light, is 
the noblest and clearest. At the confer¬ 
ence in the Marburg he contrasts most 
favorably with Luther in his willingness 
to be reconciled for the good of the com¬ 
mon cause; and he was one of the very 
few who in those days believed that the 
good and earnest heathen could be saved. 
The same reaching after better light ap¬ 
pears in more unlikely places. Even Cal¬ 
vin, when he gave up the proofs of the 
heresy of Servetus, was moved to say that 
it seemed to him that since he did not 
wield the sword of Justice, it was his duty 
to confute heresy by sound doctrine, rather 
than to seek to extirpate it by any other 


First Lecture . 


35 

method; and Oliver Cromwell, who, after 
all, struck more nearly than any other 
Englishman of his time the true note of 
tolerance, wrote in his account of the 
storming of Bristol, which was read in all 
the congregations about London on the 
21 st of September, 1645 : “ For, brethren, 
in things of the mind we look for no com¬ 
pulsion but that of light and reason.” 

These men were dogmatists, distinctly 
men of doctrine. It is a blessed thing 
that in all times, and never more richly 
than in the Reformation days, there have 
always been other men to whom religion 
has not presented itself as a system of 
doctrine, but as an elemental life in which 
the soul of man came into very direct and 
close communion with the soul of God. 
It is the mystics of every age who have 
done most to blend the love of truth and 
the love of man within the love of God, 
and so to keep alive or to restore a healthy 
tolerance. Indeed, the mystic spirit has 
been almost like a deep and quiet pool in 


Tolerance . 

which tolerance, when it has been growing 
old and weak, has been again and again 
sent back to bathe itself and to renew its 
youth and vigor. The German mystics of 
the fourteenth century made ready for the 
great enfranchisement of the fifteenth. The 
English Platonists', who had the mystic 
spirit very strongly, became almost the 
re-creators of tolerance in the English 
Church. The mysticism of to-day gives 
great hope for the earnest freedom of the 
future. 

I must not try, interesting as the task 
might be, to enter into the vexed question 
of the tolerance or intolerance, or rather 
the mixture of tolerance and intolerance, 
in the men who brought the Christian 
religion to our American shores, and espe¬ 
cially in the Puritans who came from Eng¬ 
land. Three things concerning them are 
worthy of our notice, — first, that the Puri¬ 
tans, who came direct from England, are 
always to be distinguished from the Pil¬ 
grims, who came by way of Plolland and 


First Lecture . 


37 

caught some of the broader spirit of that 
“ nursery of freedom and good-will; ” sec¬ 
ond, that the noblest utterance of hopeful 
tolerance in all that noble century was in 
the famous speech in which John Robinson, 
their minister, bade loving farewell to his 
departing flock at Leyden, in which occur 
those memorable words: “ I am verily 

persuaded, I am very confident, that the 
Lord has more truth yet to break out of 
His holy Word; ” and thirdly, that some¬ 
where in the bitter heart of Puritanism was 
hidden the power which, partly by devel¬ 
opment, and partly by reaction, was to 
produce the freedom of these modern 
days. 

Confused, irregular, forever turning in¬ 
side out, forever going back upon itself, 
the history of Christianity, however super¬ 
ficially we glance at it, seems to bear wit¬ 
ness to three things, — first, that every 
hard bigotry is always on the brink of 
turning into tolerance, and every loose tol¬ 
erance of hardening into bigotry; second, 


Tolerance . 


38 

that on the whole, positive belief and 
tolerance are struggling toward a final har¬ 
mony; and third, that true tolerance be¬ 
longs with profound piety and earnest 
spiritual life. In those three facts lie 
wrapped up together the philosophy and 
the hope of tolerance. 

There is one other study in the history 
of tolerance to which I should like to point 
your thoughts, but which it would need at 
least a whole lecture to follow out in any¬ 
thing like complete detail. In modern 
times there are six books, five of them 
proceeding from the English race, and the 
other one having close connection with 
and influence upon that English race, all 
of them books of remarkable literary and 
historical value, which, taken together, pre¬ 
sent the feeling of our race toward toler¬ 
ance most picturesquely and correctly. 
Let me recall to you their names, and 
commend you to the study of them in 
connection with each other. 

Of these six books, three belong abso- 


First Lecture, 


39 


lutely to the seventeenth century, one 
hovers between the seventeenth and the 
eighteenth, one is most characteristically 
of the eighteenth, and one is a nineteenth- 
century book through and through. 

The first, of course, is Milton’s stately 
work, the “ Areopagitica, or the Speech 
for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing.” 
It was born of a special occasion in the 
poet’s life; but in it the noblest spirit 
of his time finds utterance, as fire will 
burst forth through any chink that offers. 
Its style is like a king’s robe, stiff with 
embroidery of gold and jewels; but, as 
always in Milton, the grandeur of lan¬ 
guage does not impair the clearness of the 
thought. The book glows with the double 
love of liberty and truth. Its argument is 
in the first place for the reader’s rights; in 
the second place for the impossibility of 
enforcing censorship ; in the third place for 
the incompetence of censors; and finally 
for the dignity of the teacher. It is a 
noble, all-embracing plea; and yet he 


Tolerance. 


40 

draws back from its last conclusions. “ I 
mean not tolerated popery and open super¬ 
stition,” he declares; but when we are read¬ 
ing of the seventeenth century, we never 
can forget that popery then was quite as 
much a political as a religious question. 

In 1644, the same year with Milton’s 
lofty work, there was put forth another, 
which is to-day almost unknown. It wears 
no king’s robe, but rather the clumsy 
gown of a Puritan saint. So quaint as to 
be almost unreadable, full of forced con¬ 
ceits, involved and confused in plan and lan¬ 
guage, Roger Williams’s “ Bloody Tenent 
of Persecution for Cause of Conscience ” is 
yet perhaps the broadest and most unhes¬ 
itating plea for tolerance in all its century. 
It did great work, and excited fierce dis¬ 
cussion in its time. John Cotton, of Bos¬ 
ton, answered it, in the style of his day, 
with “ The Bloody Tenent of Persecution 
washed and made white in the Blood of 
the Lamb; ” to which the persecuted apos¬ 
tle of Rhode Island answered with “ The 


First Lecture. 


4i 

Bloody Tenent yet more bloody by Mr. 
Cotton’s endeavor to wash it white.” The- 
first book in the controversy is the only 
valuable one of the series. It is a dia¬ 
logue between Truth and Peace. Its lan¬ 
guage, its imagery, and the grounds of its 
argument are Scriptural. Its protest is 
that the armies of Truth, like the armies 
of the Apocalypse, “ must have no sword, 
helmet, breastplate, shield, or horse but 
what is spiritual and of a heavenly nature.” 
In that statement there is the sum of the 
whole matter. 

After the Puritan and the Heretic comes 
the Churchman. Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s 
“ Liberty of Prophesying ” appeared in 
1647. The music of the master of sen¬ 
tences is still in the world’s ears. The 
service which he rendered to the simplicity 
of truth can never be forgotten. His dem¬ 
onstration of the futility of intolerance 
leaves no room for dispute. And yet the 
book has not the greatness of Milton’s or 
of Roger Williams’s. It is the book of an 


Tolerance . 


42 

ecclesiastic. It deals rather with the im¬ 
possibility of compulsion, as if, if it were 
possible, compulsion would not be so bad 
a thing. Its highest spirit is perhaps 
summed up in one sentence, in which it 
declares that “ It is best every man be 
left in that liberty from which no man can 
justly take him unless he assure him from 
error.” Here there is an alternative sug¬ 
gested ; although it is also suggested that 
that alternative is unlikely or impossible. 
But the very suggestion makes us less sur¬ 
prised to hear how at the Restoration the 
good bishop became at least a less ardent 
champion of tolerance than he had been in 
his days of exile and distress. 

Coleridge has compared Milton’s work 
with Taylor’s, and has declared, with un¬ 
necessary harshness and insinuation, that 
“ the man who in reading the two does not 
feel the contrast between the single-mind¬ 
edness of the one, and the strabismus in 
the other, is — in the road to preferment.” 
On the other hand, our own historian, 


First Lecture . 


43 

George Bancroft, has a glowing passage 
in which he makes comparison between 
Jeremy Taylor and Roger Williams. The 
latter he declares to be “ the harbinger of 
Milton and the precursor and superior of 
Jeremy Taylor.” “Taylor,” he says, “ lim¬ 
ited his toleration to a few Christian sects; 
the wisdom of Williams compassed man¬ 
kind.” There is truth in what both Cole¬ 
ridge and Bancroft say; and yet the “ Lib¬ 
erty of Prophesying” had a place which 
neither of the other books could have filled 
in English life and literature and religion. 

The fourth of the great books of toler¬ 
ance is Locke’s “ Letter of Toleration,’’ 
which was published in 1689. By that 
time the spirit of the eighteenth century 
was already in the air, and the high ideal 
life of the earlier part of the seventeenth 
century had vanished. Locke belonged 
to the coming age, which he was doing 
more than any other Englishman to cre¬ 
ate; and his notion of tolerance is all 
characteristic of himself. It is of the 


Tolerance. 


44 

earth, earthy. It is all based on his con¬ 
tract theory of government. He denies 
altogether that the care of souls belongs 
to the civil magistrate, because it has never 
been committed to him. His book is to 
Milton’s, or Williams’s, or Taylor’s, what 
the lawyer in the community is to the 
poet, the philanthropist, or the priest. 

The most powerful and the most charac¬ 
teristic book of tolerance of the eighteenth 
century, Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise,” be¬ 
longs not to England, but to Germany. Its 
idea is that of the ring-story, which in it is 
adapted from Boccaccio. Neither of the 
three great religions, Jewish, Christian, or 
Mohammedan, is exclusively or even pre¬ 
eminently true. Every man born in one 
of them should tarry in his birthplace. It 
is in the truest sense a book of scepticism. 
The truth which it discovers, the inspira¬ 
tion it imparts, are of the sceptic’s kind. 
It is the book which springs from and 
which serves a transition time. It is a 
book for the world to rest on for a moment, 


First Lecture . 


4b 

and then almost immediately outgrow. 
The far less-known work of Lessing, his 
treatise on “The Education of the Human 
Race,” is a much nobler book, and in its 
indirect and more unconscious way does 
greater work for tolerance. 

And so, to come to our own age, there 
is no need to do more than name John 
Stuart Mill’s “ On Liberty ” as the utter¬ 
ance of the true nineteenth-century voice 
on tolerance. It is utilitarian in a very 
high but a very distinct sense. The use¬ 
fulness of tolerance; how both silenced 
truth and silenced error, and men who 
need truth, and the institutions of men 
which need men who have free access to 
discussion; how all of these will suffer if 
thought be enchained, — this is his argu¬ 
ment. The usefulness of tolerance, — not 
directly its glory, its obligation, or its 
sacredness, — the usefulness of tolerance 
is what our prophet of the nineteenth cen¬ 
tury stands up to proclaim with his clear 
logic and strong style. 


46 Tolerance. 

These are the six books. The first are 
greater than the last. The first three 
books strike a more lofty note and paint 
a purer color, because they define a higher 
motive of tolerance than the last three. 
This is because the seventeenth century is 
higher than the eighteenth, and because, 
after all, the best spirit of the nineteenth 
century is not really in its book on toler¬ 
ance. Perhaps it is not in the tolerance of 
our time itself. Century of tolerance as 
ours is, we all know how much of the deep¬ 
est spiritual life of our time, while it may 
have looked with no dislike upon the tol¬ 
erant dispositions which were all about it, 
has not directly and enthusiastically lent 
them its inspiration. 

And this leads me at once to what I 
want to say about the closing portion of 
my theme,—the hope of tolerance. I have 
spoken quite in vain unless you see how 
deeply I believe that the value of tolerance 
lies in its devoutness. I have tried to show 
not merely that a man may be cordially 


First Lecture . 


47 

tolerant and yet be devoutly spiritual, but 
also that a man cannot attain to the highest 
tolerance without being devoutly spiritual. 
Too long have piety and tolerance seemed 
to be open foes, or to keep but an armed 
truce with one another. Too long have 
young thinkers on religion imagined that it 
was disloyal to the truth they held, and to 
the Master whom they loved, to strive after 
cordial sympathy with and understanding 
of the earnest men and systems who were 
farthest from their truth and from their 
Master. Here is the first hope for toler¬ 
ance, — not for its wider extent, but for its 
better kind. It will grow more and more 
religious. It will be filled with deeper 
piety. We shall not in moral perplexity 
hope that a man may be tolerant in spite 
of his devoutness; we shall confidently 
expect a man to be tolerant because he is 
devout. The first duty, I think, of the 
young students of to-day, whose mature 
work lies in the future, is to adjust their 
minds to that expectation, and always to 


48 Tolerance. 

make themselves think of piety and toler¬ 
ance, not as enemies, but as dear friends. 

When the time comes in which that 
friendship of piety and tolerance shall be 
fully asserted and accepted, then will be 
written a greater book than any of those 
which have been dedicated to the praise of 
Freedom. Then the Milton or the Mill of 
that distant day, inspired with a yet more 
glowing love for liberty, feeling the power 
of a divine utilitarianism, will be able to 
describe tolerance so that it shall seem 
to be not, as it has so often seemed, the 
license of self-will or the refuge of despair, 
but the broadest and deepest obedience of 
the soul to Christ, and the full flower of the 
ripest piety of the most earnest sainthood. 
In such presentation of herself, which is 
her only true presentation, Tolerance must 
claim the heart of the world. 

Until that day arrives it is our duty to 
strive that tolerance shall not be travestied 
and misdescribed either by bigotry on the 
one side, or by what is called “free thought” 


First Lecture . 


49 

upon the other. Before all efforts for the 
extension of any principle or power must 
always come the effort to understand and 
to define it rightly; we must know what it 
is before we can be enthusiastic for it our¬ 
selves, or enthusiastically urge it on our 
fellow-men. 

In all this long lecture I have not till 
now attempted to give a definition of tole¬ 
rance. I have felt almost as one feels 
about life, — that he wants to live before he 
tries to tell himself or his brethren what 
life is; but now may we not say of tole¬ 
rance that it is this : “ The willing consent 
that other men should hold and express 
opinions with which we disagree, until they 
are convinced by reason that those opin¬ 
ions are untrue”? There are five things 
involved in that definition which I must 
beg you to notice. First, the consent is 
willing; it is no mere yielding of despair. 
It might have all the power to put down 
the error by force which pope or parlia¬ 
ment ever possessed, and it would never 


4 


Tolerance . 


50 

for a moment dream of using it. On the 
other hand, secondly, it is simply consent. 
Tolerance is not called upon to champion 
the cause in which it disbelieves, nor to 
lend trumpets through which what it be¬ 
lieves to be error may be blown. For, 
thirdly, it is of the very essence of tolerance 
that there should be disagreement; and 
disagreement involves the positive con¬ 
viction on which I have insisted all this 
evening. And, fourthly, the error which 
is not to be yielded until it is convinced of 
its untruth by reason, must be attacked by 
reason; and so the right and the duty of 
earnest discussion is included as a part 
of tolerance. And, fifthly, the tolerance 
which is patient toward what it counts 
honest error, is utterly impatient toward 
dishonesty, toward hypocrisy, toward self- 
conceit, toward cant, whether it be on the 
side of what the honest man thinks to be 
error, or of that which he thinks to be true. 
There is a moral intolerance which must go 
with intellectual tolerance to give it vigor. 


First Lecture . 


5* 

Cordial, discriminating, positive, out¬ 
spoken, conscientious: all these things the 
perfect tolerance must be; all these things 
it is bound to be by its very definition. 

Keeping these qualities, which must be¬ 
long to the perfect tolerance, clearly in our 
minds, are there not certain things which 
we may say with regard to the way in 
which that perfect tolerance will some day 
or other come to be the established condi¬ 
tion and the ruling power of the world? 

1. I have already said, at most abundant 
length, that it cannot come about by mere 
indifference. 

2. Equally sure is it that it cannot come 
by mere eclecticism. That is the dream 
that haunts some amiable minds. Some day, 
so such minds fancy, some great peace¬ 
maker will pick out from every system of 
thought its choicest dogma, and setting 
them together, will build a dogmatic home 
where every soul shall be completely satis¬ 
fied, because when it looks up it will see 
its own chief article of faith set in a place 


Tolerance . 


52 

of honor in the walls. It will accept the 
dogmas of the other souls because of the 
light which they will get from this of its, 
and it will cease to mourn for the rest of 
its cherished possessions which have no 
place in the new structure, because of its 
thankfulness that this its principal treasure 
has been saved. 

Of all the stories of eclecticism, I think 
that none is more interesting than that 
of the great Akbar, the mighty Mogul 
Emperor, him whom Max Muller calls 
“ the first student of comparative reli¬ 
gions.” He lived and died almost three 
centuries ago; but his story reads like a 
record of life in one of the great cities of 
to-day. In his palace at Agra he held his 
Friday evenings, when Buddhist, Hindu, 
Mussulman, Sun-worshipper, Fire-worship¬ 
per, Jew, Jesuit, and Sceptic, all came and 
argued, and the great monarch sat and 
stirred the waters, and gathered out of the 
turmoil whatever pearl was anywhere cast 
up to the top. He did not exactly, like a 


First Lecture . 


53 

modern lady of society, invite a college 
professor to lecture to her friends upon the 
Infinite, in her parlor, on a summer’s after¬ 
noon ; but he hung a Brahmin in a basket 
outside his chamber window, and bade him 
thence discourse to him of Brahma, Vishnu, 
Rama, and Krishna, till the great Akbar 
dropped asleep. The result was an eclec¬ 
tic faith, a state religion, a thing of 
shreds and patches, devised by the inge¬ 
nious monarch, enforced by his authority, 
accepted by his obsequious courtiers, and 
dropping to pieces and perishing as soon 
as he was dead. It was the old first fatal 
difficulty of eclecticism, that each man 
wants to make his own selection, and no 
man can choose for others, but only for 
himself. 

3. Nor is the promise of the future to be 
found in the idea that some day one of the 
present forms of faith, one of the present 
conceptions of God and man and life, shall 
so overwhelmingly assert its truth that 
every other form of faith shall come and 


Tolerance . 


54 

lay its claims before its feet and ask to be 
obliterated and absorbed. Truth has not 
anywhere been so monopolized. And no 
man who delights in the activity of the 
human mind as the first condition of the 
attainment of final truth by man, can think 
complacently of any period short of the 
perfect arrival at the goal of absolute cer¬ 
tainty with reference to all knowledge, 
when man shall cease to wonder and cease 
to inquire, and so pass out of the possi¬ 
bility of error and mistake. 

4. And yet, again, our hope cannot lie 
contentedly in the anticipation of a mere 
superficial unity of organization and of 
government which will cover over and 
make men forget the differences of 
thought and opinion which lie in their 
unreconciled diversity below. Great is. 
the craving after unity, — so great, so 
deep, so universal, that we know it is a 
part of God’s first purpose for humanity, 
and never can die out till it has found 
its satisfaction. But it is too great and 


First Lecture . 


55 

deep ever to find its final satisfaction 
in identity of organization. You cannot 
make the unit to be a unit by the exter¬ 
nal unity of one hard shell. If the fruit 
which you try to enclose is alive, it will 
burst your shell to pieces as it grows. If 
it be dead, your shell will soon hold only 
a dry and rattling remnant, to which it 
can give no life. No, the real unity of 
Christendom is not to be found at last in 
identity of organization, nor in identity of 
dogma. Both of those have been dreamed 
of, and have failed. But in the unity of 
spiritual consecration to a common Lord 
— so earnestly sought by every soul that, 
though their apprehension of Him whom 
they are seeking shall be as various as 
are the lights into which a hundred jewels 
break the self-same sunlight — the search 
shall be so deep a fact, so much the deep¬ 
est fact in every soul, that all the souls 
shall be one with each other in virtue of 
that simple fact, in virtue of that com¬ 
mon reaching after Christ, that common 


Tolerance . 


56 

earnestness of loyalty to what they know 
of Him. There is the only unity that 
is thoroughly worthy either of God or 
man. 

That seems to many men, I know, to be 
dim and vague. It is a terrible and sad 
sign of how far our Christianity is from 
its perfection that now, after these centu¬ 
ries of its sway, the central key and secret 
of its power should seem dim and vague 
to men. But the hope of the future, 
the certainty of the future, is that the per¬ 
sonality of Christ, as holding the loyalty 
and love of all the varying orders of 
mankind, and making them one in their 
common affection and obedience to Him, 
is to become more and more real with 
every Christian generation, till it is at last 
for all mankind, as it is now for multi¬ 
tudes of earnest souls, the reallest thing in 
all the world. Organizations and dogmas 
are of aid as they help to that. When 
that shall come, in the degree in which 
that shall have come in any age, tolerance 


First Lecture . 


57 

will fill that age as it at last must fill the 
world with its great, active, thoughtful, 
stimulating, sympathetic peace. 

It must follow from all this that toler¬ 
ance is to come about, not by any trans¬ 
action, not by compacts and bargains, not 
by deliberate concession and compromise, 
but by the rising flood of life. Its hope 
lies in the advancing spirituality of man. 
He who hopes for it, let him hope for it 
thus profoundly. He who fears it, let 
him take comfort in the assurance that it 
can never come except with such a deeper 
occupation of the life of man by God as 
shall rob it of all the dangers which he 
fears. 

I turn to you, the students of theology, 
of God, of science, and of human life, 
— the future ministers of Christ. You 
must be men, you must be ministers, of 
tolerance. But the true way in which you 
can be that is to forget tolerance and be 
ever more and more completely men of 
truth and men of Christ. So you must 


58 Tolerance . 

be led on into that only worthy tolerance 
which, as I have tried to show to-night, 
and as I should like to say once more be¬ 
fore I close, consists of the love of truth 
and the love of man harmonized and in¬ 
cluded in the love of God. 



SECOND LECTURE, 

Gentlemen : 

The second of the great Mogul emper¬ 
ors, the wise and energetic Jahangir, used 
to have a chain hung down from his cita¬ 
del to the ground, communicating with a 
cluster of golden bells in his own chamber, 
so that every suitor might apprise the 
monarch of his demand for justice with¬ 
out the intervention of the courtiers. It 
would be interesting to know what the 
courtiers thought of such an apparatus. 
No doubt there were some to whom it 
was a great offence. Full of the thought 
of themselves, it seemed an insult and im¬ 
pertinence that any of his people should 
presume to approach their lord except 
through them. There must have been 



60 


Tolerance . 


other more generous natures who rejoiced 
that, however irregularly, the direct and 
fundamental relation between the monarch 
and his people should be recognized, and 
that the meanest man in all the kingdom 
might send his complaint or his petition 
direct to the king’s ear. Doubtless also 
there were those in whose breasts the 
sight of the hanging chain wakened self¬ 
questionings. Why was it that such an 
apparatus was required? Why should 
not these petitioners send their petitions 
through the appointed channels? Had 
the courtiers perhaps made their courtier- 
ship too narrow and unsympathetic to be 
the medium of interpretation between the 
people and their lord? 

All three of these suggestions come 
into the mind of the Christian Church 
when it sees human souls, apart from her 
ordinances and institutions, seeking the 
ear and heart of God. The first thought 
springs up in the baser portion of the 
Church’s heart; the other two are good 


Second Lecture. 61 

and healthy. One of them is thankful 
that, valuable as the Church is to the soul 
and to the world, every son of God has 
still open to him that power of direct 
appeal and personal approach which the 
Church is meant to stimulate and help, but 
never to deny or supersede. The other 
thought keeps the Church full of wakeful¬ 
ness and watchfulness, ever on the alert to 
see how she can make herself less un¬ 
worthy of her mission, a truer and broader 
minister of God to man. Both together 
preserve in the Church the spirit of 
tolerance. 

May I not, as I begin to speak this 
evening to you, students of divinity, 
men who very soon will make a part of 
the Church’s ministry, pause for a mo¬ 
ment with a word of exhortation, and beg 
you never, in your thankfulness for all 
the Church’s blessed richness, to forget the 
personal belonging of the child to the 
Father, of the human soul to God, which 
lies behind all that the Church can be or 


62 


Tolerance . 


do. There will come times when in your 
own deepest need or loftiest exaltation you 
will forget that you are ministers, and 
simply know yourselves as men, children 
of God. Then you will come directly to 
Him heart to heart. There are times 
when the courtiers themselves, leaving the 
'whole courtly ceremonial aside, will touch 
the chain and ring the golden bells. Let 
such moments interpret to you the simple, 
personal, unchurchly religious impulses 
which make up so much of the world’s 
religion. Let such moments at once fill 
you with a deep sense of the reality and 
value of many a religious experience of 
which the Church in her institutional life 
takes no account, and let it also make you 
anxious that the Church should be so simple 
and true and human, so full of love and 
faithfulness to human nature, that more 
and more of the religious life of man may 
find its ministry and help in her. The 
channel which is not wide enough to con¬ 
tain the full torrent of the spring-time is 


Second Lecture . 63 

thankful that the drops she cannot hold 
find wayward courses of their own down 
to the sea; and at the same time she 
makes herself wider and wider, that more 
and more of the water may find way 
through her. 

And now there are several subjects sug¬ 
gested by what I said the other evening 
of which I should like to speak to you 
to-night with more or less of order and 
coherence. I said then, you remember, 
that tolerance, so far from being a thing 
of loose beliefs and feeble earnestness, had 
its real life in certain convictions and pro¬ 
found piety. If this be so, then it is surely 
true that the Church, which is the home of 
clear faith and spiritual consecration, ought 
to be the citadel of tolerance; and we, mem¬ 
bers and ministers of the Church, ought 
to look forward to the time when, setting 
distinctly before the world the true nature 
of this grace, she shall attract men by its 
beauty and win men to it and to herself. 

But now it is time for us to note a 


64 Tolerance . 

distinction which has no doubt occurred to 
a good many of your minds while I have 
spoken. When we speak of tolerance, we 
may have in our minds either one of two 
classes of things and thoughts toward 
which the tolerant disposition is de¬ 
manded; and we may easily be led to 
draw a line between them, and say: 
“ Toward one class tolerance is good; 
but toward the other class, how is toler¬ 
ance possible?” There is the tolerance 
toward other forms of good thinking and 
good working than our own; and there is 
the tolerance toward forms of working and 
thinking which we do not at all hold to be 
good, but totally and irremediably bad. 

The first thing which we can say with 
regard to that distinction is, that it is one 
of which we never ought to think that we 
can be absolutely sure at first sight. Our 
sense of the value of our way of working, 
if it is very deep, — as it ought to be, in 
order to make our work vital and enthusi¬ 
astic,— is almost sure to blur the distinc- 


Second Lecture. 65 

tion between the work and the way of 
doing it, to make the color seem part of 
the substance, to make the man who is 
doing the same work in another way ap¬ 
pear to be doing another work. Nowhere 
does a man need more clearness of mind 
and soul than here. The only thing that 
can keep him absolutely true is such a 
pure value for the thing itself, such a 
desire and craving for the success of the 
essential work, as shall compel it always 
to stand out before the thought sharp and 
distinguishable from all the ways in which 
the work is being done. 

But granting that this distinction can 
be kept, then the objects for our tolerance 
fall into the two classes of which I spoke. 
First, there are the opinions which we 
recognize as probably or possibly present¬ 
ing other sides of truth than ours. Here 
everything ought to be clear and easy, if 
we understand human nature. God has 
made man with two powers in relation to 
the laying hold on truth: one of these 
5 


66 


Tolerance . 


powers is general, the other special. By 
one of them man values truth in its es¬ 
sence, laying hold upon the fundamental 
difference between truth and falsehood; 
by the other, expressing itself in his pecu¬ 
liar faculties and character, he seizes upon 
particular forms or kinds of truth and 
makes them distinctively his own. The 
true student is aware of both of these 
powers, and never lets them lose them¬ 
selves in one another. “ I love truth,” he 
says, sweeping into the range of his affec¬ 
tion all the unknown truth that every spe¬ 
cial scholar is discovering in the most 
distant regions of investigation. What the 
astronomer is seeing in the skies, and the 
mathematician in the mystery of form and 
number, and the metaphysician in the soul 
of man, — all these the truth-lover claims 
for his own as he stands at the heart of 
things and says, “ I love truth.” And yet 
this does not hinder him from putting 
forth his special faculty and comprehend¬ 
ing, as we say, one special kind of truth, 


Second Lecture . 6 y 

and enthusiastically declaring, “ This is 
my truth.” This double hold on truth is 
all-important. If the first element is lost, 
the scholar narrows to a meagre special¬ 
ist ; if the second element grows weak, he 
fades into a vague and abstract theorist. 
He must have both. But he is very sure 
not to have both; he is very sure to lose 
the larger hold on truth in its essence, 
— truth as truth, — unless he knows, and 
is rejoiced to know, that other men are 
holding other truths than his; and what 
we are used to call other sides of truth 
are really other truths. It is very like our 
conception of the world we live in. I love 
my country, and I love the whole earth; 
but my love for the total earth would fade 
and grow dim if I did not realize and re¬ 
joice that men with my humanity were liv¬ 
ing at the Tropics and at Baffin’s Bay. It 
is in virtue of my being at once an Ameri¬ 
can and a man that my intelligence and my 
love can take possession of the world. 

Therefore no man is truly tolerant who 


68 


Tolerance . 


does not merely consent, but rejoice that 
other men think differently from himself 
regarding those subjects of thought which 
are capable of various apprehension. I 
have heard some of our bishops declare 
with thankfulness and pride that there was 
no difference of opinion in their dioceses; 
that all the clergy (I suppose they would 
hardly undertake to answer for all the laity 
there) thought alike. I know some minis¬ 
ters who want all their parishioners to think 
after their fashion, and are troubled when 
any of their people show signs of thinking 
for themselves and holding ideas which the 
minister does not hold. Thank God, the 
human nature is too vital, especially when it 
is inspired with such a vital force as Chris¬ 
tian faith, to yield itself to such unworthy 
slavery. Many and many is the minister 
who, when his people have first gone forth, 
full of the fire which God has sent to them 
through him, to think of God as he taught 
them to think of Him, has by and by 
become a learner from his people’s lives, 


Second Lecture . 


6g 

and found in their experience how good it 
is that the divine light shines on many 
mirrors and completes its revelation in no 
single soul! 

Of the other class of things of which I 
spoke, the case is different. I am not called 
upon, nay, I am not at liberty, to rejoice 
in the existence of any opinion which I 
know to be untrue. I am not called upon, 
nay, I have no right, to be thankful that my 
neighbor is an atheist, and denies the truth 
of God’s being, which is to me the glory 
and the inspiration of all life. Tolerance 
toward him means something different 
from a glad sense that he fills out my par¬ 
tial truth with something which it lacked. 
Tolerance toward him means two things. 
It means, first, a cordial and thankful rec¬ 
ognition of all the good personal charac¬ 
ter which there is in him, including most 
carefully the frankness and honesty which 
makes him clearly face and openly declare 
this very atheism which distresses and 
offends my soul. It means, in the second 


Tolerance . 


place, the full acceptance of the idea that 
it is only by the persuasion of reason that 
this atheism can be legitimately attacked 
and overthrown. Where these two ele¬ 
ments, personal respect and confidence in 
reason only as the means of conversion, 
are present, tolerance is perfect. Then the 
strong platform is built on which you can 
meet your atheist or unbeliever and wage 
strong warfare for the truth which you 
believe. Upon that platform let no earn¬ 
estness be spared. One of the worst things 
about intolerance is that its puts an end to 
manly controversy. Calvin cannot argue 
with Servetus when he is putting the fire 
to the fuel which surrounds his victim at 
the stake. Laud cannot demonstrate epis¬ 
copacy to the Puritans whom he despises 
and believes that it is right to put down 
by force. The only atmosphere in which 
strong, manly controversy, which is one of 
the noblest activities on earth, can truly live 
and flourish, is the atmosphere of toler¬ 
ance, — an atmosphere whose elements are 


Second Lecture. 


7' 

respect for personal qualities and trust in 
the power of truth. 

All this applies especially to that which 
often seems to be the hardest kind of toler¬ 
ance, which is the tolerance of intolerance. 
Very often this is the last infirmity of libe¬ 
ral minds. After you have conquered or 
outgrown all your unwillingness that men 
should think in enterprising and dangerous 
ways, you turn and look in on yourself, 
only to find your soul full of uncharitable 
thoughts towards men who still are keep¬ 
ing the reluctance which you used to feel. 
Until you get rid of those thoughts you are 
not fully tolerant. It is possible to get rid 
of them. Towards the narrow-minded bigot 
both of the dispositions of which I spoke 
may come into full play. You may feel in 
his bigotry the high quality of personal sin¬ 
cerity, and you may cordially own that not 
even so unpleasant a usurper as his bigotry 
must be attacked with any other artillery 
but reason. So you may be tolerant even 
of intolerance, — which is very hard. 


72 


Tolerance. 


2. I pass on, next, to speak of the way in 
which the question of tolerance is related 
to the declared and visible fellowships of 
men. It may be that what I have said 
thus far has seemed too large. Intoler¬ 
ance, as it exists to-day, does not, con¬ 
sciously and declaredly, at least, seek to 
banish from existence those with whom it 
disagrees. It says only that it cannot in¬ 
clude them in the group of privileged 
men, in the community, the society, the 
church which holds only those who think 
aright. Let us look at this for a few 
moments. 

We must remember, then, that there is 
more than one fellowship which must be 
taken into account in estimating a man’s 
relation to his fellow-men. Every true 
Churchman, — that is, every man who truly 
values his place in the Christian Church, — 
it seems to me, must think of himself as 
standing in the midst of four concentric 
circles. He is the centre of them all. 
They represent the different groups of his 


Second Lecture. 


73 

fellow-men with whom he has to do. They 
sweep in widening circumference around the 
spot of earth on which he stands, and make 
the different horizons of his life. What 
are they? Outermost of all, there is the 
broad circle of humanity. All men, simply 
as men, are something to this man. It is 
the consciousness “ Homo sum,” the con¬ 
sciousness which the Latin poet crowded 
into his immortal line, which fills this circle 
with vitality. Next within this lies the 
circle of religion, — smaller than the other, 
because all men are not religious, but large 
enough to include all those of every name, 
of every creed, who count their life the sub¬ 
ject and the care of a Divine life which is 
their king. Next within this lies the circle 
of Christianity, including all those who, 
under any conception of Him and of their 
duty toward Him, honestly own for their 
Master Jesus Christ. And then, inmost of 
all, there is the circle of the man’s own 
peculiar Church, the group of those whose 
thought and worship is in general identical 


Tolerance. 


74 

with his who stands in the centre and feels 
all these four circles surrounding him. 

Can you not seem to see him standing 
there in the midst of these circumferences? 
And the first thing of importance is that 
each one of the four should be feal to 
their central man, and never wholly lost 
out of his consciousness. It will not do 
for either of them to.become unreal; all 
the others will surely suffer if it does. To 
the true disciple, to the real member of the 
Church of Christ, it must still be a fact 
of which he is aware, and which he thinks 
most important, that he belongs with other 
Christians who think of Christ differently 
from himself, and with religious men who 
never heard of Christ, and with all men 
simply in virtue of their being men, 
whether they are religious men or not 

Of course the relationships with all these 
groups are different. The four radii of the 
four circles vary very much in length. 
The inmost circle nestles to its centre with 
a warmth of sympathy which the others 


Second Lecture. 


75 

do not know. That is all right. But the 
important point is that they all are real. 
There come times in the life of the mem¬ 
ber of Christ’s Church when he needs each 
one of these four horizons of life,—times 
when the close foreground of completest 
sympathy is what his soul requires; times 
when the middle distance of a more gen¬ 
eral unity of faith, a unity with those who 
own and love the same Christ differently 
conceived, or with those whose souls are 
touched with the same great general aspi¬ 
rations in some pagan faith, enlarges his 
view of the presence of God in the world; 
still other times, when nothing short 
of the great mountain-tops of humanity 
which stand around all special human liv¬ 
ing and thinking will satisfy his gaze. 

I value very much this doctrine of the 
concentric circles, this doctrine of the four 
horizons, because I think that in forgetful¬ 
ness of it lies the secret of many of the 
corruptions of the Church’s faith and life. 
The “ unity of faith ! ” we say. Of course 


y6 Tolerance . 

those words have their most close and 
sacred meaning, as they express the deep 
sympathy of men who in almost all points 
of belief see eye to eye, and perfectly 
agree, — men who delight in the common 
service of a Master whom they understand 
alike. But that inmost unity of faith grows 
weak and narrow unless the men who feel 
it feel also constantly the unities of faith 
which lie beyond. I cannot live truly with 
the men of my own Church unless I also 
have a consciousness of common life with 
all Christian believers, with all religious 
men, with all mankind. 

And then we note another thing: not 
merely are these four circles all real to the 
true Churchman, — the circles of human¬ 
ity, of religion, of Christianity, and of his 
Church; they also feel each other, and the 
inner and smaller are always reaching out¬ 
ward to the larger. The Churchman as he 
lives in all of them becomes aware that, 
actually distinct as they are now, they are 
ideally and essentially identical with one 


Second Lecture. 


77 

another. He feels a throb and thrill 
through all the system, which he finds to 
be the effort of the smaller circle to em¬ 
brace the larger. Each smaller circle is 
restless and discontented until it at least 
has touched the larger circumference of 
which it always is aware. The special 
Church reaches out and craves to enlarge 
itself until it shall be able to include within 
itself all Christianity. Christianity is anx¬ 
ious to claim all the religious life of all the 
world for Christ; and true religion grows 
more and more anxious to declare that re¬ 
ligion is not something foreign to human¬ 
ity, that it is simply the fullest utterance of 
human life, that all human life which is not 
religious falls below itself. Not man with 
religion is something more, but man with¬ 
out religion is something less, than man. 

Most interesting is this perpetual out¬ 
reach, this throb and struggle of the 
inner circles to fill the outer circles with 
themselves. But it touches our present 
purpose only so far as it describes the 


y8 Tolerance. 

relation between the inmost circle and the 
one that lies next beyond it, — the circle 
of the Church and the circle of general 
Christianity. There it touches directly 
upon most important questions, — upon 
questions which you, young clergymen, 
will have to meet almost as soon as you 
find yourselves ordained. The Church 
horizon, as I said, is always reaching out 
toward the Christian horizon and trying 
to identify itself with it. If it could per¬ 
fectly do so, all would be well. But there 
is not a Church in Christendom which can 
do so to-day. There is not a Church in 
Christendom — hot ours, nor any other — 
which is not forced to own that there are 
men whom she will freely acknowledge to 
be Christian men, whom yet she is not 
ready and fit to receive into full commu¬ 
nion and membership with herself, into full 
acceptance of her privileges and full en¬ 
joyment of her influence. Some dogma 
doubted, or some dogma held, or some 
peculiarity of thought or feeling on their 


Second Lecture . 


79 

part, stands in the way. Some excess or 
some defect of faith keeps the Christian 
outside the Christian Church! 

Is it not so? I can see nothing to do 
but frankly to face the fact and own it. 
A man comes to you, who are a minister 
of our Church, and tells you of his faith, 
tells you how earnestly he loves, how 
deeply he honors, the Lord Jesus Christ, 
tells you how he is trying to give his 
whole life up to the Master’s service. Is 
he a Christian? Of course he is; you 
cannot doubt a moment. You are sure 
what the Lord would have said if He had 
met him in Jerusalem. But can you, 
simply and solely because he is a Chris¬ 
tian, throw wide the door and bid him wel¬ 
come to our Church’s inmost privileges? 
Are there no tests of doctrine, no speci¬ 
fied ways of worship, no definitions of 
orthodoxy, which lie within the defini¬ 
tions of the absolute truth, which you must 
apply before you can bid that Christian 
welcome to the Church and feel that he 


8o 


Tolerance. 


and it belong together? If there are, 
then the Church is not prepared to-day 
to make herself identical with Christian¬ 
ity. If the chance to do so were freely 
given her, she is not ready to accept it. 
Therefore she is not catholic; she is not 
prepared to lay claim to universality. 

And what must be the consequence of 
such a state of things? Must there not 
be two consequences? The first conse¬ 
quence must be a perpetual restlessness 
under her own restraint, a perpetual de¬ 
sire to make all thought orthodox which 
is true, and all action legitimate which is 
really helpful to the human soul. We 
ought to be very thankful for every such 
disposition wherever it shows itself in our 
Church. We ought to be very glad when, 
reaching out in either way, — either back 
into the past, gathering up any disused 
method which the Church may have now 
grown wise enough to use; or forward 
into the future, eagerly claiming any light 
which free-minded criticism and enlarged 


Second Lecture. 


81 


knowledge can throw upon the pages of 
the Bible, — the Church grows broader in 
spirit, more ready to do the work of God 
and to meet the religious needs of man. 

The other consequence must be a cor¬ 
dial tolerance. So long as any Church is 
aware that there are Christians to whom 
she, as she is now constituted, cannot 
open her doors, she must be more than 
content — she must be thankful and re¬ 
joice— that there are forms of worship 
and groups of believers in which those 
Christians for whom she has no place may 
find fellowship with one another and feed 
their souls with truth. While she is ever 
trying to make her own embrace more 
large, to bring herself into a true iden¬ 
tity with the absolute Christianity, she will 
be glad enough that in the mean time the 
souls for which she has no place are not 
to go unhoused, that there are other 
Church homes than her own in which 
they may live, that she is not the whole 
Church, that in the largest and truest 
6 


82 


Tolerance. 


sense the Church, even to-day, does em¬ 
brace all servants of Christ in their innu¬ 
merable divisions. Such souls there must 
be so long as there is no Church -in the 
world which is exactly coincident with 
essential Christianity, no . Church which 
makes the standards of her membership 
exactly the same, — not one whit more, as 
well as not one whit less than the standard 
by which a man would have a right to 
count himself and to think that Christ 
would count him a true servant of the 
Lord of Christians. If there are two cir¬ 
cles, one less than the other, those who live 
in the space between the two must be ac¬ 
counted for. This is the ground on which 
the man and the minister who believes 
most enthusiastically in his own Church 
may yet keep — nay, must yet keep — 
a true tolerance for other churches. 

The great safeguard and assurance of 
the tolerant spirit in the Christian minister 
then lies in the clear distinctness of these 
four horizons about the central point on 


Second Lecture. 8 j 

which he stands. He does not stand re¬ 
lated to them all alike; one presses more 
closely than another on his life. But to 
know that he has relations to them all, and 
to keep those relations distinct and true, 
that is his safety. First, and most cen¬ 
trally, he is a man of his own Church. 
Her doctrines he believes, her methods he 
devoutly uses, her history he studies. By 
her peculiar genius his life is colored and 
inspired. He never dreams of anything 
but loyalty to her. But he goes out be¬ 
yond her in his interest and study, and 
tries sympathetically to understand all that 
the Christian workers are doing, all that 
the Christian thinkers and scholars are dis¬ 
covering, in any of the rich fields in which 
they work. He is a Christian, and nothing 
done or thought in the name of Christ is 
foreign or alien to him. Then he goes 
out to a still wider circle. All that the 
religious life of the world before Christ 
and aside from Christ has been and has 
accomplished, is of interest to this man 


Tolerance . 


84 

standing in his central Church. Not in 
supercilious pity, not in a spirit of cap¬ 
tiousness which tries only to see their 
weaknesses and faults, but with a pro¬ 
found reverence for them all as true reve¬ 
lations of his own beloved God, as faint 
shinings through the cloud of his own en¬ 
lightening Christ, so does the true Church¬ 
man study the religions of the ages 
and of the world. He reveres in them the 
God ever ready to show Himself to His 
children, and the soul of man ever reach¬ 
ing forth, blindly, awkwardly, stumblingly, 
but with an irrepressible persistency to find 
the Father. And then, last of all, man, — 
all that he has been, all that he is, all that 
he is making of this wonderful, beautiful 
world; man with his history, his poetry, 
his art, his science; man very often in his 
deepest godlessness bearing most convinc¬ 
ing witness of God by the way in which he 
shows his need of Him — man in his simple 
manhood makes the largest circle which 
surrounds this central life. 


Second Lecture . 


*5 

Do you not see how every study in 
which it is possible for man to engage may 
be a true part of the ministers preparation 
for his work? Christianity in all its forms, 
comparative religion, human life, the world 
he lives in, all these he must know in some 
degree, in as great degree as is in his power. 
Is he not the most central man in all the 
world? Must he not be inspired and filled 
with devoutness, vitality, and tolerance as 
he stands in the midst of his horizons? 

3. Let me pass to another topic. The 
question of tolerance will probably always 
be connected with the question of penalty. 
Not that they are necessarily connected; 
it is possible for a man to be intolerant of 
an opinion different from his own, and yet 
never to feel that he has a right to assign a 
penalty to the holding of that opinion, or 
even to want to say what will befall the 
man who holds it. Penalty is the shadow 
which condemnation casts when it shines 
down smitingly upon the thing which it 
condemns. No doubt sometimes the con- 


86 


Tolerance . 


demnation may take place in such a clear, 
diffused light of pure thought that it may 
cast no shadow. The intolerant man 
may be content to say, “ I hold that 
opinion to be wholly base and wrong and 
mischievous, and I would put it down even 
by force if I could,” and yet may not be 
tempted on to denounce punishment upon 
the man who believes that opinion to be 
true. I do not doubt that there is a great 
deal of such intolerance as that. Many 
people are ready to believe that with the 
passing away of the use of axe and fagot 
in religious persecution all pronouncing of 
penalty in religious differences has disap¬ 
peared. I wish that it were so. The evil 
of intolerance would be vastly less if it 
simply denounced and upbraided the opin¬ 
ion with which it disagreed, and did not go 
farther, and condemn it to a punishment, 
the fear of which once attached to any 
opinion is a most serious obstacle to the 
discovery of the degree of truth which 
that opinion may contain. 


Second Lecture. 


87 

“ But,” people say, “ how is this pos¬ 
sible? Now that we cannot burn our 
heretics, and now that they do not mind 
our excommunications, how can there be 
such a thing as persecution any more?” 
I answer, “If it be possible to keep alive 
the idea — if in some of her teachings the 
Church does keep alive the idea — that 
wrong opinions about God and Christ and 
salvation are not merely to show their 
influence in hampered and harmed lives, 
but are also to be definitely punished by 
God as wickedness, then the most terri¬ 
ble form of persecution is still possible.” 
People used to shut out a certain doctrine 
from the reach of fair inquiry by decreeing 
that whoever came to believe that doctrine 
should be stretched upon the rack, and 
then be led through the hooting streets in 
a disgraceful dress, and at last burned with 
fire in the public square. What terror had 
a penalty like that compared with the 
terror which belongs to this other threat, 
which declares or implies that he who 


88 


Tolerance . 


believes this or disbelieves that shall per¬ 
ish everlastingly ? Can such a declaration 
still let the soul be free to seek for truth ? 
Must it not make very difficult, if not im¬ 
possible, that search after the truth mixed 
and hidden in the error which ought to be 
our strongest desire when we deal with 
things which we esteem erroneous? 

I cannot doubt that the present confused 
and rebellious condition of men’s minds 
with regard to the punishments of the 
future life comes in part, and in large part, 
from the way in which punishment in all 
ages of the Church has been denounced 
upon speculative opinions and earnest con¬ 
victions. Bidden to believe that souls 
would be punished for wrong-thinking, 
people have come to doubt whether souls 
would be punished for anything at all. 
The only possibility of any light upon the 
darkness, any order in the confusion, must 
lie in the clear and unqualified assertion 
that such as God is can punish such as 
men are for nothing except wickedness, 


Second Lecture . 


8 g 

and that honestly mistaken opinions are 
not wicked. How a clear assertion of such 
a simple truth as that cuts the knot of 
sophistry at once; how it makes the whole 
system of persecution for opinion’s sake 
appear impossible ! It would have seemed 
as if that simple truth were quite self- 
evident. But it is not. The whole long, 
awful history of persecution and torture 
for opinion’s sake proves that it is not. 
A multitude of men to-day have aban¬ 
doned the idea of persecuting their breth¬ 
ren for their opinions, only because they 
either, on the one hand, have seen the 
hopelessness and uselessness of it, or else, 
upon the other hand, have been willing 
to leave the punishment of the errorist to 
God. That sort of tolerance is superficial 
and unstable. The only ground for us to 
take is simply the broad ground that error 
is not punishable at all. Error is not 
guilt. The guilt of error is the fallacy and 
fiction which has haunted good men’s 
minds. It has not always stood out plain 


Tolerance . 


90 

and clear; such fictions seldom do. It 
has been mixed with thoughts of the mis¬ 
chievousness of error, and with suspicions 
of the maliciousness of error; but always 
lying in behind, in the centre of the im¬ 
pulse which made man persecute his 
brother man for what he thought, there 
has been the idea that error was guilt. 
We must get rid of that entirely. Error 
is not like guilt; error is like disease. 
Behind disease there may lie guilt as a 
cause, — the man may have been wicked, 
and so made himself sick; and so a man 
may have been reckless, defiant, sophisti¬ 
cal, selfish, wicked in many ways, and so 
have plunged himself into error. But he 
may have fallen into error without any 
such wickedness; and even if his error 
be the fruit of wickedness, it is in the 
wickedness, the moral wrong, and not in 
the error which has proceeded from it, 
that the guilt lies. 

Guilt could be inseparably attached to 
error only on the assumption that there 


Second Lecture . 


91 

was on earth some revelation of God’s 
truth so absolutely sure and clear that no 
honest man could possibly mistake it, — so 
sure and clear that any man who mistook 
it must necessarily be wanton and obsti¬ 
nate and disobedient; and such a revela¬ 
tion certainly does not exist, and never has 
existed on the earth. 

The most striking indications, to my 
mind, that error is not guilt, and does not 
properly call forth those emotions which 
only guilt ought to produce, lies in the 
way in which many opponents of error 
feel called on to ascribe base motives to 
the men who hold it. They have to turn 
error into moral wrong before they can 
abuse it as only moral wrong deserves to 
be abused. They are like the Inquisitors 
of old, who when they led their victims to 
the stake, dressed them in grotesque and 
horrid garments that the populace along 
the street might forget that they were 
men, and hoot at them with free voices and 
consciences as if they were fiends. When 


Tolerance . 


92 

a controversialist, arguing against a certain 
doctrine which he thinks all wrong, charges 
its upholders with “the subtlety of the 
adulterer and the cold-blooded cruelty of 
the assassin,” have we not a clear token 
of misgiving; have we not a sign that he 
himself believes that not in pure error, but 
only in malignant dispositions found or 
feigned in errorists, is their real guilt or 
the real ground of moral reprobation of 
their thinking? 

Once get rid of the whole notion that 
error is in itself a guilty thing, and two 
good results must follow, — first, moral in¬ 
dignation, called back from the false scent 
on which it has been wasting itself, will 
have its time and strength to give to those 
things which are really worthy of its hatred. 
Again and again in history the Church, 
pursuing error with her anathemas, has for¬ 
gotten to denounce cruelty, hypocrisy, and 
corruption, which were flagrant in her 
very bosom. Blame given to the blame¬ 
less makes us very often most lenient to 


Second Lecture. 


93 


the blameworthy. Insincerity (whether it 
profess to hold what we think is false or 
what we think is true), cant, selfishness, 
deception of one’s self or of other people, 
cruelty, prejudice, — these are the things 
with which the Church ought to be a great 
deal more angry than she is. The anger 
which she is ready to expend upon the 
misbeliever ought to be poured out on 
these. 

And, again, when the denouncing of 
penalties on wrong belief shall be done 
with, then the calm portrayal of the con¬ 
sequences of wrong belief shall have a 
better chance. To tell an honest un¬ 
believer that God will punish him for not 
believing that which his mind can see no 
sufficient reason for accepting, — that, if 
he is a real man, only fixes him more 
certainly in unbelief. To point out to 
him how his unbelief is shutting him out 
of great regions of joy and growth, and 
robbing his nature and separating him 
from God, — that is legitimate enough. 


Tolerance. 


94 

It cannot make him believe, — only posi¬ 
tive evidence ought to do that, — but it 
can set him to a more serious examination 
of evidence, and take away from the truth 
that air of unlikelihood which is the atmos¬ 
phere in which so many of the wanderers 
go astray. 

In all our thinking and speaking we are 
to stand guard over the purity of ideas. 
And the wrong use, the wrong application, 
of an idea violates and vitiates its purity; 
so that when it comes back to its true 
application, it works feebly or works 
falsely. It is as if you whittled your fire¬ 
wood with the surgeon’s knife; when the 
next delicate operation comes, the fine¬ 
ness and the sharpness are not there. 
You love an unlovely nature, and your 
very power of love grows coarse; when 
the true loveliness stands up before you, 
your love is coarse and lustful. You ad¬ 
mire baseness, and you have nothing but 
a debased admiration to give to nobleness. 
You hate a troublesome truth, and it is 


Second Lecture . 


95 

only a weak and peevish dislike, not a 
generous indignation, which you have to 
bestow upon a flagrant lie. Like precious 
essences whose strength lies in their purity, 
are these capacities of strong emotion 
which make the worth and vigor of a 
human life. 

Stand guard, then, over your moral 
condemnation ; do not let it go out 
against honest error. If you do, it will 
come back to you with its finest fire chilled 
and cooled, with its eager impetuosity 
hesitating and half palsied, with its reality 
dimmed and confused. Keep it till you 
meet a bad man, a false man, a cruel man. 
Then, just because you have not flung it 
out loose on all the errors which you dis¬ 
approved, but on which by its very nature 
it could take no hold, it will spring at the 
throat of the wickedness which by its very 
nature it was made to hate and is bound 
to try to kill wherever it can find it. 

How quickly one discovers as one goes 
about in the strange, windy world of 


Tolerance. 


protestants, reformers, radicals, philan¬ 
thropists, and denouncers of the world’s 
innumerable wrongs, which are the few 
among the multitude who have kept their 
power of moral condemnation pure by 
using it only at the right times and on 
the right material. How they shine like 
clear stars in the midst of the lurid light 
of all the rest! 

4. It is a truth which is essential to what I 
have been saying, and one which for its own 
great value cannot too often be repeated, 
that the Christian faith is set on moral 
ends and can find a satisfaction with which 
it can be wholly satisfied only in human 
character. This is a truth which affects 
most fundamentally the priesthood of the 
Christian minister. The purpose of the 
Christian faith is man. Man is the end, 
truth is the means. It is the place of 
Christianity to take up the purposes of 
God and keep the proportions of His 
ways and standards. Christianity, then, 
must hold man as her purpose, truth as 


Second Lecture . 


97 


the means by which that purpose may be 
reached; character always behind belief, 
belief always as the gateway and vestibule 
to character. 

Now, the priest is the expression and 
embodiment of Christianity; what the 
Christian faith is in its great impersonal 
abstractness, that he is in his active per¬ 
sonality. He is the keeper of the things 
of God. And of what things? Of truth, 
no doubt. He is to find by every most 
persistent search, to keep with sleepless 
care the truth of God. If there is any 
truth of God hidden in history or in the 
methods of interpretation of the Sacred 
Book, it is the priest’s duty to go and find 
it with the fearless search of consecrated 
reason. Alas for him if he leave that 
work to be done by unconsecrated and 
perhaps by hostile hands ! The keeper of 
the truth of God, the priest is certainly; 
but always for its purposes, always for 
men. As God’s great purpose on the 
earth is man, not truth; as He will freely 


g8 Tolerance . 

let His truth be misunderstood, and wait in 
perfect patience for the time when it can 
free itself from misconceptions and come 
out clear and sure, but will never let any 
one of His children be put in a place where 
he must necessarily do wrong, — so (and it 
is the first truth of his ministry) the pri¬ 
mary and final care of the true priest of 
God is human character; and truth is in 
his hands, not for its own value, but as an 
instrument for that. 

You, my friends, will be before many 
years called to be priests in the Church of 
God. With an ordination which you can 
even now feel hovering over your heads, 
you will find yourselves set apart to the 
sacredest and most delightful life which 
men can live. How shall you account of 
yourselves? how shall you ask men to 
account of you there? Paul says, “As 
ministers of Christ and stewards of the 
mysteries of God.” A steward keeps his 
treasures for their uses. He is no miser 
or connoisseur, keeping his mysteries for 


Second Lecture . 


99 


their own preciousness or curious beauty. 
The steward of the mysteries of God keeps 
truth for men; and back of his keeping of 
truth he keeps men, he keeps human char¬ 
acter, he keeps the true qualities of the 
best humanity in the men committed to 
his charge, so that those qualities may not 
be lost or corrupted. 

May this be your priesthood ! May you 
count yourselves the keepers of truth; but 
may you count yourselves still more the 
keepers of truthfulness ! May you dread 
a stain of error on the truth your people 
hold; but may you dread vastly more the 
stain of insincerity or self-deception in 
the way in which they hold any truth, 
however true! Great is the power of the 
priest who thus stands guard over the hu¬ 
manity of his people, and will not, if he 
can prevent it, let the most well-meaning 
adversary do it harm or dishonor. He 
has the most sacred of all the mysteries of 
God in charge; for a life is a more sacred 
mystery than any truth, and truth exists 


i oo Tolerance. 

in the world but for the sake of human 
lives. 

It is not strange in this world to see 
ends sacrificed to means; but it is no less 
sad because in history it has grown so 
familiar. I remember a curious illustra¬ 
tion of it which I heard some years ago in 
England. It seems that in Westminster 
Abbey a good many Roman Catholics 
have been in the habit of coming, on the 
day of his sainthood, to pray beside the 
tomb of Edward the Confessor at the old 
shrine where petitions of devout pilgrims 
were offered up for centuries. The late 
Dean Stanley loved the custom; it pleased 
his catholicity and his historic sense, and 
he gave it all encouragement. But it 
seems that it did not so well please one of 
the old vergers or sextons of the Abbey; 
and one day when the worshippers were 
numerous, this venerable official came to 
one of them, and touching him on the 
shoulder as he knelt upon the ground, 
said: “ You must go away from here.” 


Second Lecture. 


IOI 


The man meekly looked up and replied: 
“ Why? I am doing no harm.” “ No mat¬ 
ter, you must go away,” reiterated the 
verger. “But why?” persisted the wor¬ 
shipper, still on his knees. “I am doing 
no harm; I am only praying.” But the 
verger persevered, and gave his most con¬ 
clusive reason. “ No matter, I tell you 
you must go away; this thing must stop. 
If this goes on we shall have people pray¬ 
ing all over the Abbey! ” There is a sort 
of verger Churchman, more sexton than 
priest of the house of God, who is always 
for stopping free inquiry, because if this 
thing goes on we shall have men seeking 
for truth all over the Church of Christ. 

The true priest knows that that is what 
the Church of Christ is for, and welcomes 
it; not merely for the truth which the 
search will bring to the light, but for the 
searcher’s sake, he welcomes it. There 
lies the real necessity that the priest 
should be above all other things a man 
with an intense and live humanity, thor- 


102 


Tolerance . 


oughly in sympathy with all that is best 
and bravest and most vital in his fellow- 
men. We all know how about the figure 
of the priest in many of the centuries of 
Christian history there has hung an air of 
mystery and inhumanity. Men, women, 
and priests have seemed to make up the 
human race. The priest was separate from 
all his fellow-men. He was the repository 
of knowledge which nobody but himself 
could understand. He lived by laws 
which were different from those by which 
other men must live. He ate strange 
food, and wore strange clothes, and talked 
in strange tones, and had power with men 
because he was different from them. If 
that was ever good, the day for it is past. 
The priest to-day must stand in the centre 
of all the four horizons and be the most 
manly of all men. What it is good for 
all men to be, he must be supremely; 
what he is supremely, it must be good for 
all other men to be. He must have the 
widest sympathy, and preach by word 


Second Lecture . 


103 

and life the broadest tolerance of all 
honest opinion, however various, however 
wrong. He must be the champion of 
the right of the most mistaken soul to 
hold and teach his opinion until he has 
become convinced that it is untrue; and 
at the same time he must be the pattern of 
intolerance upon the moral side, and have 
no patience with any sin, however respect¬ 
able or useful. It is the fundamental con¬ 
ception of Christianity as a religion of 
character, and not of dogma, save as a 
means to character, which makes necessary 
and makes possible a priesthood such as 
this. 

I have not left myself the space in 
which to speak as I intended of the de¬ 
tailed methods and means by which the 
minister of Christ may cultivate the 
broad and positive tolerance which I 
have praised in your hearing during these 
two lectures. But not to leave that sub¬ 
ject totally untouched, I must say a few 
words about that power to which many 


104 


Tolerance. 


people in these days are looking as the 
force which is to bring the most discord¬ 
ant thinkers into sympathy with one 
another. I mean the power of practical 
work. We all know how the Church in 
all its branches has wakened from its 
lethargy and become aware of the misery 
and sin of which the world is full, and 
undertaken, with an energy which was 
not known a few years ago, to do its duty. 
It is an inspiring sight; and one of the 
things which is most beautiful about it is 
no doubt the way in which it unites in 
practical benevolence men who are very 
far apart in their ways of thinking and 
believing. The Quaker and the Roman¬ 
ist may stoop together to lift the drunk¬ 
ard from the gutter. The Churchman 
and the Agnostic may struggle side by 
side against the pestilence of the grog¬ 
shop and the filth of the tenement-house. 
Nay, more; men who are utterly at vari¬ 
ance about great points of theology may 
plead with the same sinful and stricken 


Second Lecture. 


103 

soul that it shall know the first great 
truths of the love of Christ and the wait¬ 
ing power of the Holy Spirit. All this is 
very good and noble. We rejoice in it 
with all our hearts. And just because we 
do rejoice in it, we want to be very clear 
about just what it is worth, and just what 
its limitations and its dangers are; for one 
of the greatest dangers to the purity and 
efficiency of any force is that it should be 
thought worth more than it is, and ex¬ 
pected to do work for which it was not 
made. By and by men are sure to be 
found at the other extreme, thinking of 
the exaggerated force far less than it 
deserves. 

The defect of Christian work as a means 
of Christian tolerance lies in its tendency 
to superficialness. I shall not be thought 
hostile or indifferent to the great bustle 
and glow of activity which fills our 
Church’s life to-day if I remind you, who 
in a year or two will be in the very thick 
of it, that it must be backed and sup- 


106 Tolerance . 

ported by thought and study and ideas, 
or it becomes very thin indeed. One 
must sometimes fear lest machineries 
should take the place of truths, and lest 
the necessity for instant action should 
crowd out the possibility of earnest 
thought in a Church so pressed upon by 
need and so aware of duty as, God be 
thanked ! our Church is to-day. But men 
must think; and the meeting of men with 
men, of souls with souls, must ultimately 
be upon the broad and open ground of 
thought. And unless I can do more than 
simply forget for a time my differences 
from my brother thinker, while we both 
stop our thinking in order to set some 
moral evil right; unless I can, clearly 
facing the fact of our difference, welcome 
it, honor the spirit of his thought, seek 
for enlightenment on my own thought 
from his, and not dream of even wishing 
to silence or to change his thought 
except by reason, — unless I gain by 
my fellow-work with him that precious 


Second Lecture . 


/07 

harmony between personal conviction and 
cordial sympathy, I am not growing tol¬ 
erant. Tolerance does not mean the 
forgetting of differences, but the clear 
recognition of them and the hearty ac¬ 
ceptance and use of them. 

It is possible for the fellowship of work 
to help us to all that; and when it does 
so, it is good indeed. It must not sac¬ 
rifice personal conviction to immediate 
efficiency. It must take those who join 
in doing it deep down into that under¬ 
world where personal convictions find 
the everlasting principles of which they 
are the individual expressions. It must 
invade and not evade the world of 
thought. It must reach and live in the 
unity which lies below, and not the unity 
which lies above, the puzzling questions 
of the soul. So only is its work thorough 
and permanent. So only does work bring 
tolerance. So only do the mission and 
the hospital and the parish machinery, 
the men’s clubs and the mother’s meet- 


io8 Tolerance . 

ings, become good for the soul. Such 
power may work have with you, my 
friends, forever enlarging and opening 
your deepest lives. 

Thus I have tried in these two lectures 
to speak of the nature, the methods, and 
the prospects of tolerance. If I have at 
all succeeded in what I have undertaken 
to do, one conviction, of which I just 
spoke as I closed the other evening, 
must have grown stronger and stronger 
in you as I have spoken. That convic¬ 
tion is that tolerance is not a special 
quality or attainment of life so much as 
it is an utterance of the life itself. Intoler¬ 
ance is meagreness of life. He whose 
life grows abundant, grows into sympathy 
with the lives of fellow-men, as when one 
pool among the many on the sea-shore 
rocks fills itself full, it overflows and be¬ 
comes one with the other pools, making 
them also one with each other all over 
the broad expanse. 


Second Lecture. 


109 

What then we need is fuller life. There 
is no word of Christ more tempting to 
any man who craves the largest and 
healthiest relations with his fellow-men 
than that word which is written in the 
tenth chapter of St. John: “I am come 
that they might have life, and that they 
might have it more abundantly.” We 
may adjust relations as we will; we may 
decide just how far we can co-operate 
with this or that heretic; we may draw 
careful distinctions between the various 
classes of opinions about which we differ, 
labelling some essential, and some non- 
essential. It is all surface-work; it is all 
uncertain; it is full of mischief and of 
blunders; it is always joining together 
souls which have no sympathy with one 
another, and throwing apart souls which 
ought to be parts of each other’s life. 
Only a deeper vitality, a richer filling of 
our spirits with the Spirit of God; an 
assurance of the possible divineness of the 
human life by an experience of how 


110 


Tolerance . 


richly it may be filled with divinity, -r- 
only this can make us be to our breth¬ 
ren and make them be to us all that 
God designed. 

My friends, be more afraid of the little¬ 
ness than of the largeness of life. Let 
that be your rule about your people when 
you come to be their minister. 

Never let yourself think, and never al¬ 
low them to think, that mere intolerance 
upon their part, mere bitterness against 
those who differ from them or from their 
Church, is faith. 

Never discourage them from thinking. 
If they are thinking wrong, do not try to 
stop their thinking, but teach them to 
think right. 

Never doubt their capacity for the best 
faith, the profoundest experience, the lar¬ 
gest liberty. 

And for yourself, let the same rule be 
master. Be more afraid of the littleness 
than of the largeness of life. Seek with 
study and with prayer for the most clear 


Second Lecture . 


iii 


and confident convictions; and when you 
have won them, hold them so largely and 
vitally that they shall be to you, not the 
walls which separate you from your 
brethren who have other convictions than 
yours, but the medium through which you 
enter into understanding of and sympathy 
with them, as the ocean, which once was 
the barrier between the nations, is now the 
highway for their never-resting ships, and 
makes the whole world one. 

This is true tolerance. Into a deeper 
and deeper abundance of that tolerance 
may our Master lead all of us whom He 
has called to be His ministers! 


University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 





































































































































































































































































































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